Barbarism at the barbers

Stephen Sondheim's macabre musical of revenge and madness, Sweeney Todd, earns a striking if stomach-turning big-screen treatment in Tim Burton's film of The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Whatever shocks audiences experienced when this Grand-Guignol-with-a-beat hit Broadway in 1979, Burton renews and re-doubles with this sung-through slasher film, a movie that spares no blood and no guts.

It's set in a Dickensian London of Gothic gray buildings, gray skies and gray-faced people, living and dead. Sweeney allows Burton to let loose his twin muses Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter on the roles of Sweeney, the barber with a grisly grudge, and Mrs. Lovett, who moons over him as she makes "the worst (meat) pies in London."

A haunted Sweeney Todd, once a London barber, has returned to the city that exiled him 15 years before for a crime he did not commit. His one thought, sung out loud? Revenge. He'll wreak his vengeance on the judge (Alan Rickman) who coveted the barber's beautiful wife and who trumped up charges and transported him to Australia. Now, with a new name and a shock of white in his voluminous mane, Todd means to have his pie, if not eat it, too.

Because once he has set up his chair above Mrs. Lovett's, and has sharpened and serenaded My Friends, his collection of silver folding razors, he's butchering "the haves" in this world of have-nots, and all the flesh has to go somewhere.

A competing barber, the flamboyant Adolfo Pirelli, must be bested. Sacha Baron Cohen lends his voice, leer and stuffed tights to this fraud. "The Beadle," the judge's able and willing cop-accomplice (Timothy Spall, appallingly appealing) must be outfoxed.

But there's also the handsome young shipmate of Todd's, Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower), who pines for the perverse judge's ward, Johanna (Jayne Wisener), and begs Sweeney's assistance in rescuing her.

Burton and screenwriter John Logan have slimmed down the musical to get this into two hours, so fans of the play may miss the odd moment or tune. Pretty Women, that edgy duet between Todd and the judge; Johanna, Anthony's swooning solo; and Mrs. Lovett's The Worst Pies in London and A Little Priest (about potential pie-fillings) are the musical highlights.

The cast doesn't sport Broadway-ready voices, though Depp is game and makes great use of that gravelly Bob Hoskins British burr he mastered for the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Carter vamps it up and scores most of the laughs and Rickman, Spall and the rest of the cast are at least pleasantly on key.

But "pleasant" was never what Sondheim, reworking Christopher Bond's play, had in mind. This is a singing trip to the abattoir, darkly amusing but also grimly sobering. Here is a wronged man so consumed by revenge that everything about him, from hair to hobnail boots, looks crazy. The barber descends deeper into barbarism, heading for an awful realization that we can see coming from the moment we first glimpse his deathly pallor.

Stylized though the violence mostly is, this is still not film fare for the weak of stomach. Be warned, if the phrase "arterial spray" puts you off, this isn't for you. This isn't Edward Scissorhands, it is Freddy Krueger in song.